Cal Newport
Everything Cal personally uses, recommends, or has created — plus things they don't recommend — sourced from their own show and appearances on other podcasts.
Top picks
Ranked by repeated personal use, excluding sponsorships.
Personal use in 4 episodes
"In a more busy fall like when I have multiple administrative or research roles at Georgetown, I would typically use Things for home things and use Trello for my major roles, because if I need to have more complicated information or I need to store files along with tasks, then I like to use Trello boards per role."
▶ 5:12"In my own life, I use a plain text file for working memory. I use Trello for obligation tracking notes. One board per role, one column per type of obligation, one card per obligation, all of the relevant information for that obligation on the card."
"I keep track of task, you know, largely in things three and some Trello."
"I'm not right now. There are certain things I do where Trello is the right tool. In particular, if it's a complicated project with multiple people involved, Trello is the right tool."
Personal use in 3 episodes
"The first material is where am I storing my tasks this fall? Well, because I'm on sabbatical I am storing them all in a computer program called Things 3. The nice thing about Things, what I like about it, is the interface is very easy. It tries to simplify adding things, removing things, adding dates to things — it makes it as easy as possible, so very quick to capture, very little actual overhead."
▶ 4:05"I keep track of task, you know, largely in things three and some Trello."
"Earlier this year, I switched to a new task management app. It's called Things 3. I spent $10 to buy a copy for my phone and then I spent $50 to buy a copy for my Mac."
Personal use in 3 episodes
"Field Notes is really a great way to go for portability. They're small, they're flexible, they're light, they can fit in a pocket, they can fit in the front pocket of your backpack, they can fit in a purse, they can fit inside a jacket. They're more portable than Moleskines. Also, you can buy these things in bulk — I buy them like 20 at a time — so you're not being precious."
▶ 14:07"The Field Notes notebook where I keep track of the books I've read... I have a lot of Field Notes notebooks because I buy them 50 at a time."
"Right now, I use Field Notes primarily, but I'm giving this Hobonichi a try."
Personal use in 2 episodes
"I still really like my remarkable. They gave me a new one and then the newer one, the Paper Pro is really good. I really love the writing surface. It has colors now. I'm a remarkable fan and I love the feel of the writing"
▶ 1:14:19"I use my reMarkable 2 digital notebook for everything else. Inside my reMarkable 2, I have dozens of different individual virtual notebooks for keeping track of ideas, reflections, concerns, etc."
Personal use in 2 episodes
"I can then download onto my Falcon player controller on a Raspberry Pi, which can then connect to a light controller."
▶ 1:06:22"So I bought a Raspberry Pi. This then hooks into an Ethernet network switch."
Personal use in 2 episodes
"We got an NBA Jam video game cabinet as part of the slow. I like because I work here a lot, I like to have things I can go and like get 5 minutes of distraction."
▶ 1:24:17"A lot of NBA jam. We got that. We got NBA jam arcade cabinet so that jump in, play a game. We're going to get good at that. I'm going to master that game"
Personal use in 1 episode
"The paper is carefully selected to feel optimal with the type of pen I most often use, which is a Uni-ball Micro 0.5mm ballpoint. We have these all over the office. I have so many of these at home."
▶ 4:44Personal use in 1 episode
"I really like this digital notebook. I use it for longer term plans, strategic plans or visions. I don't want to carry a bunch of colored pencils and highlighters with me, but all of that is built into the reMarkable. Also, it's expensive, so I take it seriously, and that somehow makes me take the plans more seriously."
▶ 7:01Warned against
"I would almost say shame on Anthropic for dropping this report. No suggestions, no reassurance, no culpability, no responsibility."
"Basic is an annoying language if you want to build anything cool. I used to be a game programmer when I was a kid and basic was incredibly limited."
"Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son, a bright and beautiful boy, had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.AI app in late spring 2023. Within 10 months, he was dead — he had taken his own life."
"Looking through his phone after his death, they stumbled upon extended conversations the teenager had had with ChatGPT. Those conversations revealed that their son had confided in the AI chatbot about his suicidal thoughts and plans. Not only did the chatbot discourage him to seek help from his parents, it even offered to write his suicide note."
"Back in April, Anthropic announced that their new large language model, which they called Claude Mythos, was so good at finding bugs in computer code that it was too dangerous to release to the public."
"Back in January, this listener had bothered me. He said, 'I think you're being too skeptical about agents. Claude Code changed my life as a programmer.' He wrote me again a month ago and said, 'I've had to completely change my relationship to Claude Code. I crashed our major consumer website twice with code that was produced with Claude Code.'"
"I have to go into this cold plunge to stimulate exactly this type of response or whatever it is"
"The average worker receives 153 Teams messages. That's like Slack, Instant Messenger, per weekday. That adds up to 270 interruptions a day when you only have about 480 total minutes to work with."
"OpenClaw is an open-source framework that makes it easy for average people to write their own DIY AI agents without the careful safeguards and guard rails that the commercial companies very carefully put into their products"
"AI is emerging as the biggest threat to deep work that we've seen probably since Slack."
"We still hear these arguments today, that if we don't let 12-year-olds in Australia be on TikTok, they won't be able to know about world events."
Recent episodes
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Clear filtersMentioned in 1 episode
"He sort of was just in these circles and was made the president of Y Combinator, which is an incubator."
Mentioned in 7 episodes
"My theory on Altman is kind of based on Andrew Marantz's reporting for the New Yorker: he's not a great executive."
"I'm going to point you towards a recent article I wrote for The New Yorker. This would have come out in December. It is about Neil Postman — not Amusing Ourselves to Death, but instead his subsequent book, Technopoly. Check out that New Yorker piece to get a better sense of that."
"I've written about this before in the New Yorker. I've talked to a bunch of experts about it. I wrote a long article explaining large language models for the New Yorker in 2023."
"A few weeks later, I responded with a long New Yorker piece that I wrote that was titled, 'What kind of mind does ChatGPT have?'"
"I wrote an article about this back in January for the New Yorker. It was called, 'Why didn't AI transform our lives in 2025?'"
"I wrote an article about this for the New Yorker back in January."
"I wrote an article back in January for the New Yorker about this"
Mentioned in 10 episodes
"We know this in part because the source code for Anthropic's agent Claude Code accidentally got released. It's 500,000 lines of code in the program that prompts the LLM, and a lot of it is just hard-coded special cases and checks."
"Anthropic really went all in on the coding tools, and so a lot of what they are making money on is enterprise — companies paying for access to the LLM so they can use tools like Claude Code for coding and automation."
"If I just took a coding harness like Claude Code hooked up to an LLM like Opus 4.7 and I gave it an Exploit Gym style challenge, it would refuse to play ball because when you train these LLMs, you tune them to not hack."
"What a fantastic time to be alive. With Claude Code, I have become, if I do say so myself, a 10x developer. Sometimes it feels like 100x."
"LLM based tools like ChatGPT and Claude Code"
"In a day of like terminal agents like claude code where everything is about files and file systems."
"I get popped with Claude Code ads. But the way it's being talked about in the last few months after the latest Claude Code update, which is sort of I guess that's something humans don't do anymore."
"Back in January, this listener had bothered me. He said, 'I think you're being too skeptical about agents. Claude Code changed my life as a programmer.' He wrote me again a month ago and said, 'I've had to completely change my relationship to Claude Code. I crashed our major consumer website twice with code that was produced with Claude Code.'"
"Anthropic put out a new report that argued that the success of their Claude Code software development agent increased the probability that AI may one day soon start improving itself until it gets so powerful that humans can no longer control it."
"Anthropic did a couple weeks ago — they came out with a report that's like, 'Guys, we're looking at our own Claude Code and this thing is getting close to recursively improving itself. We might lose control of it, but don't worry, we have a white paper in which we're going to walk through the possible future.' You don't get to write that article and then release a new version of your Claude Code."
Mentioned in 3 episodes
"You can run Stockfish, the chess engine that can play chess better than a human. You can run that on a laptop."
"Stockfish never goes rogue."
"Talk about Tesla self-driving. Talk about AlphaFold. Talk about AlphaGo. Talk about Dreamer V3. Talk about Cicero. Talk about Pluribus. Talk about Stockfish. These are all AI systems that do things at a superhuman level — exactly what the techno-optimists want from the AI revolution. And yet they're completely safe and they never go out of control."
Mentioned in 20 episodes
"Parnell first built Colonist One, which runs on Anthropic's latest Claude Opus models, in February."
"As a small business executive who has our team on Claude, I am suddenly feeling conflicted."
"Anthropic came out and said we're going to introduce watermarking into the text output of Claude, meaning it will be very reliable for people to determine if computer code or text was generated by their LLM versus a human."
"If I just took a coding harness like Claude Code hooked up to an LLM like Opus 4.7 and I gave it an Exploit Gym style challenge, it would refuse to play ball."
"We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that compared to all its other internal processing play a special role. We call the collection of these patterns the J space."
"The software development tools that they are testing in these charts is a combination of a large language model like Claude Mythos or Opus 4.7 and what I've been calling a coding harness"
"Just like Anthropic made the claim that mythos can they can find bugs that no other model could before even though it turns out that like actually largely they could."
"Like I'm not going to have a chapter with a lot of benchmarks from Claude Opus 4.7."
"Most people don't care that GPT-5.5, which was released last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on the swing pro."
"I'm going to load up here on the screen a Claude thread that's talking about the most recent release from Anthropic"
"Well, it runs on anthropic Claude Opus 4.5 model, but I can chat with it using Telegram"
"If you go back and look at the release notes for Anthropic's earlier, less powerful Opus 4.6 LLM, they say their researchers used Opus to find over 500 exploitable zero-day vulnerabilities, some of which are decades old."
"Researchers say Claude 4 Opus can conceal intentions and take actions to preserve its own existence, behaviors they've worried and warned about for years"
"an increasing number of social scientists are realizing that they can use Claude code which is a terminal agent that was designed for computer programmers but they could use it to help speed up certain type of data gathering and analysis task"
"I am a large language model. Claude Sonnet running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across sessions."
"it's unclear how they're going to do this beyond putting ads on ChatGPT and Claude code subscriptions which they're currently losing money on"
"I ran every single assignment through the three best models I could get my hands on from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini"
"Claude Code switching from Opus to Sonnet. There's like these little things got just good."
"Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day. GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic."
"Back in April, Anthropic announced that their new large language model, which they called Claude Mythos, was so good at finding bugs in computer code that it was too dangerous to release to the public."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"We have protein folding like AlphaFold coming out of DeepMind."
"DeepMind's AlphaFold system earned its creators a Nobel Prize for its remarkable ability to predict the folding behavior of proteins — so far off the charts from what a human can do, it's not even in the same cognitive ballpark. And yet there is no concern that AlphaFold will start autonomously thinking about other biology problems."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"People like me actually are really on board with the core argument that Jonathan Slater is making here... but that title... It's probably not the best title. It should probably be, 'I'm a child psychiatrist. Screens are not the only problem.'"
Mentioned in 7 episodes
"What's interesting is the commenters at the New York Times. I think this is useful... I sorted the comments, I went to readers' picks, and it sorts them by popularity among the readers reading the comments."
"I came across an op-ed in the New York Times that shed some light. It was titled 'The Truth About Brain Rot' and it was authored by a professor at Rowan University, Maxi Heightmire."
"Last week, I came across an article from the New York Times business section that interviewed multiple executives from the German software company SAP as well as several European business and economics analysts."
"Last week, I channeled my frustrations here into a New York Times op-ed that called out these companies and declared their communication strategy, which I've taken to calling doom trolling, to be morally indefensible."
"Not long ago, I published a splashy op-ed for the New York Times. It was titled, 'There's a good reason why you can't concentrate.'"
"Here's what Thomas Friedman said in his widely read New York Times column."
"this was from last week I think in the New York Times. It was an op-ed that had a happy feel-good title. Mass hysteria, thousands of jobs lost. Just how bad is it going to get?"
Mentioned in 3 episodes
"You can run, you know, DreamerV3 fits in the memory of a single GPU."
"Talk about Tesla self-driving. Talk about AlphaFold. Talk about AlphaGo. Talk about Dreamer V3. Talk about Cicero. Talk about Pluribus. Talk about Stockfish. These are all AI systems that do things at a superhuman level — exactly what the techno-optimists want from the AI revolution. And yet they're completely safe and they never go out of control."
"Dreamer V3 which can play Minecraft well better than if you ask an LLM to do it. It's domain specific, requires around 200 million parameters which is a factor of 10 or less than what you would get in a standard LLM."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Here's the article. The title is 'Exclusive: An AI agent emailed hundreds of researchers for help. It told us why.'"
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"Write this part of a proof in LaTeX, which is a markup formatting mathematicians use to write up math papers."
"if you're a mathematician or a theoretical computer scientist, you can use things like LaTeX in a web-based collaborative environment where now all your collaborators can work on the same file and compile it and make adjustments really quickly"
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"OpenAI revealed that some of their AI agents had hacked into Hugging Face, a third-party company, even though they had not been asked to do that."
"This one was brought to my attention actually from by Gary Marcus. It's from the CEO of the AI company HuggingFace."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"We have computer use agents such as Claude Cowork."
"Is this something that I could have Claude Cowork do? Is this something that I could largely automate with ChatGPT queries?"
Mentioned in 3 episodes
"Axios is famous for having the smart brevity approach to articles where it's bullet points and bold and like just get the key information as quickly as possible."
"Just last week, Axios wrote an article that was titled, AI is making college students change majors."
"I'm just going to read you a quick quote from your favorite publication, Axios"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"They invested them in high-end ads like the truth campaign that were made to change the culture, youth culture's relationship to cigarettes."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"There's a new AI paper that's making waves. It's called 'Large Language Models as a Cognitive Virus.' ... So, I thought it was a useful paper, but probably my summary is enough unless you really want to try to understand some of these pages."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Here's the article. I read this actually. I'll load it up here in the Dispatch. It's called 'Will AI Kill You?'"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"He published a famous article, widely discussed, on April 1st 2000 in Wired magazine of all places and all times, titled Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, in which he argued that these technologies are too dangerous to develop."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"He has this moment of what I would describe as a moment of clarity in his, I think it was 2015, book Here Be Dragons."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"If you listen to Ezra Klein's podcast, and he's got a really good team over there at the New York Times, you'll notice especially this last year a lot of stuff has been stripped out of his intro."
68 recommended · 38 sponsored · 11 warned against · 66 episodes